A roundtable discussion on centering Indigenous voices in Abiayala (Latin America) with Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, María de los Ángeles Aguilar Velásquez, and Polly Lauer, addressing questions about Indigenous representation both in the media and the field of Latin American Studies. Hosted by the Romance Studies, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, History, the Klarman Program, and the Language Resource Center.

Dr. Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante is a scholar who belongs to the Mapuche people. He is currently president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and an Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Cárcamo-Huechante is also a founding member of the Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, a collective of engaged Mapuche researchers based in southern Chile. In 2007, he published his first book, Tramas del mercado: imaginación económica, cultura pública y literatura en el Chile de fines del siglo veinte (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio). His most recently published book is Acoustic Colonialism: Acts of Mapuche Interference (Duke UP, 2025).

Dr. María de los Ángeles Aguilar Velásquez is a Guatemalan Maya K´iche´ historian, whose research centers on the policing and criminalization of Maya Spirituality in Guatemala during the second half of the 20th century. She has worked on collaborative research projects centered on historical memory, collecting testimony from Indigenous communities and genocide survivors. For over nine years, Dr. Aguilar was a columnist in Guatemala’s newspaper elPeriodico, where she wrote about the country’s social and political issues and denounced repressive policies that affected the Maya population. She received her Ph.D. in History from Tulane University in 2021. From 2021 to 2024 she was a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLAIS) at Yale University, where she taught courses on Latin America Studies and Political Violence in Latin America.

Dr. Polly Lauer is an allied scholar who works collaboratively with Maya K'iche' media makers in Guatemala. Her book project, Struggling for Air: The Politics of Resilience in a Maya K’iche’ Radio Station, 1959-2020, documents the history of the oldest Maya K’iche’ radio station in Guatemala. This interdisciplinary project illustrates how Indigenous actors wielded communications technologies to defend language, community, and autonomy through periods of crisis. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American History from Yale University and is an incoming assistant professor of Native American Studies at the University of Montana in Missoula, MT.